Larry Brown

Larry Brown (born September 14, 1940, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) is an American basketball player and coach, the first coach to win both a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I men’s national championship and a National Basketball Association (NBA) title. Few people have coached basketball in as many places, with as much success, as Brown. He earned a reputation as a teacher who was capable of getting the most out of his players and rapidly improving young teams. As much as Brown was cast as a pedant and even an uncompromising crank, he always relished working with top talent—making the best even better. In a way, Brown was a wandering scholar, a basketball nomad, crisscrossing the landscape of the sport to dispense wisdom and push players. The titles and accolades were a by-product. Brown’s allegiance was to the game itself.

Before Brown became the quintessential coach, he was quite the player. He spent his college years at the University of North Carolina, where from 1960 to 1963 he learned from storied coaches Frank Maguire and Dean Smith. After a brief stint as an assistant coach at North Carolina, Brown returned to the court as a member of the New Orleans Buccaneers of the American Basketball Association (ABA). Brown was one of the league’s early stars. Over five seasons with five teams, he established himself as a scrappy, cerebral point guard. He was the Most Valuable Player of the 1968 ABA All-Star Game and once dished out a league-record 23 assists in one game.

In 1972 Brown hung up his sneakers and planted his feet firmly on the sidelines. Fittingly, considering his future itinerant coaching reputation, he lasted only the summer off-season at Davidson College before heading to the Carolina Cougars of the ABA. In 1974 he began coaching the Denver Nuggets, one of the ABA’s standout teams and one of only four franchises absorbed into the NBA two years later. Brown—who had been with the ABA since the league’s inception—returned in the college game in 1979, coaching at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). He took that team to the NCAA championship game in 1980, but after two seasons Brown returned to professional basketball to coach the NBA’s New Jersey Nets in 1981. He again lasted just two seasons, before taking over at the University of Kansas in 1983. Brown led Kansas on an impressive run that resulted in the 1988 NCAA championship. He left Kansas for the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs soon after the Jayhawks’ title, a decision that was perhaps influenced, in part, by the fact that NCAA violations at both UCLA and Kansas would not follow him into the professional ranks.

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From 1988 to 1997 he coached several NBA teams, almost always getting positive results. Inchoate squads took shape; superstars hit their stride. In 1997 he became coach of the Philadelphia 76ers, where he joined forces with the fiery diminutive guard Allen Iverson for six seasons. They made an unlikely run to the NBA finals in 2001 before the two strong personalities got too strong for each other, and Brown’s wanderlust returned, leading him to resign from the 76ers in 2003 to join the Detroit Pistons.

During his first season with the Pistons, he finally won an NBA title. In the 2004 NBA finals, Brown outcoached and outmaneuvered Phil Jackson and his star-studded Los Angeles Lakers. It was a case of the hardworking underdog and good old-fashioned basketball triumphing over glitz and big names. In short, it was Larry Brown summed up in a single series. The Pistons were hardly slouches that season (finishing with the second best record in the Eastern Conference), but they had not been given much of a chance by basketball prognosticators against the Lakers. Brown made the difference through his intense focus on details and all-out effort, which was always his modus operandi.

Disappointing stints with the New York Knicks and Charlotte Bobcats followed his Pistons tenure. In 2010 he was fired by the Bobcats, and he returned to the college ranks to coach at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in 2012. He led SMU to a conference championship and an NCAA tournament appearance in 2015. In the following off-season he was again hit with NCAA sanctions, as the team was banned from the 2016 postseason and Brown was suspended for nine games following an academic-fraud investigation of an SMU player. In July 2016 Brown resigned from SMU. Two years later he became the head coach of Fiat Torino in Italy’s top professional basketball league. However, he left the team in December 2018, after it posted a record of 5-19. In 2021 Brown became an assistant coach at the University of Memphis.

Brown was named the ABA Coach of the Year three times (1973, 1975, and 1976) and earned the NBA’s version of that honour in 2001. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2002.

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